1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to techniques for monitoring the health of a computer system. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and apparatus for determining whether a computer system is at the onset of degradation by monitoring a difference function for the variance of a monitored telemetry variable.
2. Related Art
An increasing number of businesses are using computer systems for mission-critical applications. In such applications, a component failure can have a devastating effect on the business. For example, the airline industry is critically dependent on computer systems that manage flight reservations, and would essentially cease to function if these systems failed. Hence, it is critically important to monitor the health of components within the computer system so that remedial actions can be performed on components that are at the onset of degradation.
One technique for monitoring the health of components within the computer system is to monitor telemetry variables generated within the computer system. These telemetry variables can include physical signals generated by transducers: such as temperature, voltage, current, and vibration, and can include software signals monitored by an operating system such as: hard disk activity, central processing unit (CPU) load, and memory usage. Existing health-monitoring techniques detect changes in the mean value of the monitored telemetry variables.